Massimiliano Lega

Using Advanced Aerial Platforms and Infrared Thermography to Track Environmental Contamination

This study introduces new methods and applications for detecting, evaluating, and tracking signs of environmental contamination using a variety of advanced aerial platforms, a suite of advanced sensors, and new detection software. Aerial platform examples include: manned aircraft and helicopters, unmanned fixed wing aircraft (UAV), and unmanned rotorcraft. The onboard sensors include an array of multispectral and electro-optical infrared cameras. The developed system, which is being used by the Italian Coast Guard, is ideal for detecting illegal and unauthorized sewer and storm-drain environmental policy violations. The methods presented here were developed to detect pollution in rivers and the sea. The results of these current studies show that: (1) infrared thermography is an ideal tool to detect environmental contamination, (2) a variety of aerial platforms ranging from manned aircraft to small unmanned rotorcraft should be used to first globally scan the region and then locally focus on the suspected site, and (3) the measured high resolution database accurately defines the current state of the region which provides a benchmark for future investigations.

Remote sensing in environmental police investigations: aerial platforms and an innovative application of thermography to detect several illegal activities

Being able to identify the environmental crimes and the guilty parties is central to police investigations, and new technologies enable the authorities to do this faster and more accurately than ever before. In recent years, our research team has introduced the use of a range of aerial platforms and an innovative application of thermography to detect several illegal activities; for example, illegal sanitary sewer and storm-drain connections, illicit wastewater discharges, and other “anomalies” on surface waters can be easily identified using their thermal infrared signatures. It can also be used to detect illegal solid/liquid waste dumps or illicit air discharges. This paper introduces first results of a Thermal Pattern and Thermal Tracking approach that can be used to identify different phenomena and several pollutants. The aims of this paper were to introduce a fingerprint paradigm for environmental police investigations, defining several specific signatures (patterns) that permit the identification of an illicit/anomalous activity, and establish a procedure to use this information to find the correlation (tracking) between the crime and the culprit or the source and the target.

Detection of environmental hazards through the feature-based fusion of optical and SAR data: a case study in southern Italy

The use of remote-sensing images is becoming common practice in the fight against environmental crimes. However, the challenge of exploiting the complementary information provided by radar and optical data, and by more conventional sources encoded in geographic information systems, is still open. In this work, we propose a new workflow for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multitemporal data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system environment. The data fusion is performed at a feature-based level. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta, in southern Italy, show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 95%, with a very low false alarm rate. A fast and easy-to-use system has been realized based on this approach, which is a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory.

IDES Project: A New Effective Tool for Safety and Security in the Environment

In the region of Campania in south-west Italy there is growing evidence, including a World Health Organization (WHO) study of the region, that the accumulation of waste, illegal and legal, urban and industrial, has contaminated soil, water, and the air with a range of toxic pollutants including dioxins. An effective environmental monitoring system represents an important tool for an early detection of the environmental violations. The IDES Project is a Geo-environmental Intelligence System developed by the CIRA with the contribution of universities and other government bodies and it aims at implementing an advanced software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The IDES main modules are: Imagery Analysis Module to monitor land-use and anthropogenic changes; Environmental GIS Module to fuse geographical and administrative information; Epidemiological domain Module; Semantic Search Module to discover information in public sources like: Blog, Social Network, Forum, Newspapers; This paper focuses on Semantic Search Module and aims to provide the greatest support to the extraction of possible environmental crimes collecting and analyzing documents from online public sources. Unlikely people denounce criminal activity to the authorities. On the other hand many people through blogs, forums and social networks every day expose the status of land degradation. In addition, journalists often, have given the interest of the public, documenting the critical environmental issues. All this unstructured information are often lost due to the difficulty to collect and analyse. The IDES Semantic Search Module is an innovative solution for aggregating of the common uneasiness and thoughts of the people able to transform and objectify the public opinion in human sensors for safety environmental monitoring. In this paper we introduce methods and technologies used in some case studies and, finally, we report some representatives results, highlighting innovative aspects of this applied research.

SAR/multispectral image fusion for the detection of environmental hazards with a GIS

In this paper we propose a GIS-based methodology, using optical and SAR remote sensing data, together with more conventional sources, for the detection of small cattle breeding areas, potentially responsible of hazardous littering. This specific environmental problem is very relevant for the Caserta area, in southern Italy, where many small buffalo breeding farms exist which are not even known to the productive activity register, and are not easily monitored and surveyed. Experiments on a test area, with available specific ground truth, prove that the proposed systems is characterized by very large detection probability and negligible false alarm rate.

REMOTE SENSING IN THE FIGHT AGAINST ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES: THE CASE STUDY OF THE CATTLE-BREEDING FACILITIES IN SOUTHERN ITALY

Enforcement of environmental regulation is a persistent challenge and timely detection of the violations is key to holding the violators accountable. The use of remote sensing data is becoming an effective practice in the fight against environmental crimes. In this work, a novel and effective approach for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multispectral data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system (GIS) environment, is proposed. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta (Southern Italy), show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 90%, with a acceptable false alarm rate, becoming a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory.

Integrated hierarchical geo-environmental survey strategy applied to the detection and investigation of an illegal landfill: A case study in the Campania Region (Southern Italy)

This paper describes an approach to detect and investigate the main characteristics of a solid waste landfill through the integration of geological, geographical and geophysical methods. In particular, a multi-temporal analysis of the landfill morphological evolution was carried out using aerial and satellite photos, since there were no geological and geophysical data referring to the study area. Subsequently, a surface geophysical prospection was performed through geoelectric and geomagnetic methods. In particular, the combination of electrical resistivity, induced polarization and magnetic measurements removed some of the uncertainties, generally associated with a separate utilization of these techniques. This approach was successfully tested to support the Prosecutor Office of Salerno (S Italy) during a specific investigation about an illegal landfill. All the collected field data supported the reconstruction of the site-specific history, while the real quarry geometry and site geology were defined. Key elements of novelty of this method are the combination and the integration of different methodological approaches, as the parallel and combined use of satellite, aerial and in-situ collected data, that were validated in a real investigation and that revealed the effectiveness of this strategy.

Tracing Cyanobacterial Blooms To Assess The Impact Of Wastewaters Discharges On Coastal Areas And Lakes

The rapid detection of cyanobacterial blooms has become an emerging and urgent need during the last years due to the increasing number of cyanobacterial harmful blooms (CHABs) all over the world. The main responsibility of this phenomenon is attributable to the nutrient enrichment, resulting from eutrophication processes of anthropogenic origin. The blooms deplete oxygen in surface waters through excessive bacterial respiration and decomposition and often release toxic substances (cyanotoxins) causing fish mortality and risks for public health. We have initiated a worldwide program for the early detection of cyanobacterial blooms using combined techniques based on chemical/biochemical analyses of samples collected on specific sites identified with remote/proximal sensing tools. Here we report our results obtained from the analysis of cyanobacterial blooms using a new powerful approach based on the combined use of LCMS/MS (Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry) and Molecular Networking to detect the presence of known and novel cyanotoxins. In addition, we report the most recent results from our case studies on specific coastal areas and lakes, where the presence of cyanobacteria was confirmed to be related to the excess nutrient input of anthropogenic origin, resulting from wastewater discharges or runoff from fertilisers and manure spread on agricultural areas. The monitoring of bloom occurrence, composition, frequency and chemistry can provide important indicators of degraded water quality, supporting the Government Bodies in the evaluation of effectiveness of wastewater plans that insist on a specific coastal area.

Remote sensing for environmental forensics: Thermal infrared images capture different surface temperatures in pollutant pools and dosed soils due to volatilization

ABSTRACT The challenges of in-situ monitoring of contaminated landscapes include the rapid assessment of large areas for potential pollutants and their potential health risk due to volatilization. This research tested in a laboratory setting if thermal infrared remote sensing can discriminate between areas with volatilizing chemicals. Five pollutants of metal salts were prepared by mixing antimony with a solvent of hydrochloric acid, and cobalt, lead, nickel, and zinc with a solvent of nitric acid. Four pollutants of hydrocarbons, at two different concentrations, were prepared by mixing diesel, gasoline, motor oil, and olive oil with a solvent of acetone. The pollutants and solvents were in liquid pools and dosed on soils in petri dishes, each pollutant in a separate container, along with controls of a deionized water pool and un-dosed soil. The petri dishes were arranged in arrays, spaced to create intermediate areas without volatilization, and placed adjacent to a fume hood that created an updraft to remove volatilization products. The cooling of the pollutant surface due to volatilization was confirmed using thermocouple-based monitoring of in-situ kinetic temperature, and the thermal infrared radiometric temperature had a strong correlation with kinetic temperature. Based on two-tailed unpaired t tests of temperatures from 256 pixels for each petri dish, with a 0.05 alpha, 97% of the 66 polluted pool pairs had statistically different temperatures, and 85% of the 66 dosed soil pairs had statistically different temperatures. This study validated that thermography can differentiate between pollutant types and concentrations based on volatilization affecting temperature and thereby extend the remote sensing toolbox for environmental forensics. Further work is required to scale up this thermography technique from the relatively simple laboratory setting to more complex field applications.

Design and simulation of the emergent behavior of small drones swarming for distributed target localization

Abstract A swarm of autonomous drones with self-coordination and environment adaptation can offer a robust, scalable and flexible manner to localize objects in an unexplored, dangerous or unstructured environment. We design a novel coordination algorithm combining three biologically inspired processes: stigmergy, flocking and evolution. Stigmergy, a form of coordination exhibited by social insects, is exploited to attract drones in areas with potential targets. Flocking enables efficient cooperation between flock mates upon target detection, while keeping an effective scan. The two mechanisms can interoperate if their structural parameters are correctly tuned for a given scenario. Differential evolution adapts the swarm coordination according to environmental conditions. The performance of the proposed algorithm is examined with synthetic and real-world scenarios.